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Saturday, December 29, 2012

This month, December, was the month that the Mideast nuclear weapons-free zone conference was scheduled to take place.

Iran was in agreement to having such a nuclear weapons-free zone, as were all the other Muslim nations in the area.

That treaty involves the idea that no nation in that region will have any nuclear weapons.

It is somewhat similar to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty signed by Iran and all of those nations -- except one -- Israel.

Iran and other significant nations in the area signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty years ago -- a treaty which gives any nations that are signatory to it the legal right to use nuclear power plants to generate electricity for their citizens.

To add insult to injury, the government of Israel, backed by the U.S. government, has cancelled its participation in the talks:

High-level talks between Israel and its Muslim neighbors regarding a nuclear weapons-free zone (NWFZ) in the Middle East have been cancelled by the US and Israel.

A nuclear weapons-free zone has been repeatedly proposed, only to have Israel – the only state in the region with nuclear weapons – reject it in favor of maintaining this nuclear monopoly, further destabilizing the region, and keeping the threat of others’ nukes as a primary excuse for its militarism.

Diplomats tell the Associated Press that the US, one of the organizers of the meeting on this latest NWFZ proposal, would likely make a formal announcement of its cancelation soon, claiming that “the time was not opportune.”

While Iran is a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has publicly pledged its opposition to nuclear weapons development, has subjected itself to thorough international inspections, and in fact has exactly zero nuclear weapons, Israel has done none of the above and has approximately 200 nuclear warheads. Iran is being severely punished and threatened with attack, Israel is supported with unparalleled economic, military, and diplomatic support.

(Anti War, quoting AP). This is rank hypocrisy on steroids and is a foreign policy debacle that is sure to diminish the good standing of the U.S. in the eyes of the other nations.

You may be wondering what this has to do with oil or with oil wars, so let's tie it together.

For decades the foreign policy of the U.S. in the region has been one of controlling the oil reserves for western use:

QUESTION: Is there a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East?

CHOMSKY: Yes. There's been a very consistent U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, at least since the Second World War, whose primary concern has been to ensure that the energy reserves of the Middle East remain firmly under American control. The State Department noted in 1945 that these reserves constitute "a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history."

Basically it is a policy meant to keep Saudi Arabia, which has by far the largest known stores of petroleum, under American control. This has been quite explicit since World War II. In fact, during the war the government tried to expel Britain, and later France, from the region. There were forms of chicanery used to achieve that end, which was achieved, certainly, by the formation of ARAMCO [Arabian American Oil Company] in 1947.

Given U.S. control over Western Hemisphere resources, the United States thus effectively controlled the major energy reserves of the noncommunist world, with all that implied with regard to the organization of international society. A number of years later, the American position in the Middle East was extended. Following the CIA-backed coup in Iran in 1953, American oil companies controlled 40% of Iranian oil. By the mid 50s, American dominance of the region and total dominance of Saudi Arabia was virtually complete.

American penetration of the Saudi economy and military has been extensive. There are now about 30,000 Americans in Saudi Arabia, mostly ARAMCO employers. U.S. exports to Saudi Arabia and Iran amounted to $28 billion each in 1976, with sales to Saudi Arabia projected to reach $4.8 billion in 1977.

(Chomsky, 1977 interview). Chomsky, over thirty years ago, envisioned exactly what was taking place then, and why it was taking place, referring in a footnote to:

U.S. Department of State. Foreign Relations of the United States. 1945, viii, 45, cited in Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, The limits of power, Harper & Row, 1972, which provides a comprehensive analysis of the development of U.S. policy at the time.

(ibid, 1977 interview, footnote 1). Likewise, he foresaw what is taking place in foreign policy today which we currently read about and hear in the media:

Suppose the U.S. had 100% of its own energy right here. That wouldn't affect in the least American desire to control the Middle East because we want to make sure that nobody else has access to those cheap resources of energy. One of the ways the U.S. keeps control over Europe and Japan is by having a stranglehold on their energy supply. Therefore, if there was a solar energy or shale breakthrough, giving the U.S. its own energy supply completely independent of Middle East oil, we still would want to ensure control over that region as long as Middle East oil remained cheap and accessible.

(ibid, 1977 interview, emphasis added). Solar energy and shale fracking for oil is a common theme in the media today, consistently presented in the context of U.S. oil independence (pro fracking here; contra fracking here).

Yet, as Chomsky presciently said thirty five years ago, the U.S. and Israel do not want to give up the nuclear weapon advantage because they want use it to help control the lifeblood of economies of the world - oil.

That is why the U.S. and Israel will not attend the nuclear weapons-free zone talks that were to take place this month.

For those who don't have the time to listen, and would rather read this material, there are some posts that contain some or all of the material in the video:

Plutonomy refers to the rich, those who buy luxury goods and so on, and that’s where the action is. They claimed that their plutonomy index was way outperforming the stock market. As for the rest, we set them adrift. We don’t really care about them. We don’t really need them. They have to be around to provide a powerful state, which will protect us and bail us out when we get into trouble, but other than that they essentially have no function. These days they’re sometimes called the “precariat” -- people who live a precarious existence at the periphery of society. Only it’s not the periphery anymore. It’s becoming a very substantial part of society in the United States and indeed elsewhere. And this is considered a good thing [by plutocrats].

I’ve kept to domestic issues, but there are two dangerous developments in the international arena, which are a kind of shadow that hangs over everything we’ve discussed. There are, for the first time in human history, real threats to the decent survival of the species.

One has been hanging around since 1945. It’s kind of a miracle that we’ve escaped it. That’s the threat of nuclear war and nuclear weapons. Though it isn’t being much discussed, that threat is, in fact, being escalated by the policies of this administration and its allies. And something has to be done about that or we’re in real trouble.

The other, of course, is environmental catastrophe. Practically every country in the world is taking at least halting steps towards trying to do something about it. The United States is also taking steps, mainly to accelerate the threat. It is the only major country that is not only not doing something constructive to protect the environment, it’s not even climbing on the train. In some ways, it’s pulling it backwards.

And this is connected to a huge propaganda system, proudly and openly declared by the business world, to try to convince people that climate change is just a liberal hoax. “Why pay attention to these scientists?”

(Tom Dispatch, Chomsky). The video is worth watching, to say the very least.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Not many people will argue with you when you say that the federal government seems to be going through a comic book episode where they fight for Shrek's Weenie.

Not much else makes a lot more sense out of the babbling and goings on over in Tinsel Town.

The republicans declare that they know the best way to screw up everything, and once again the democrats are becoming more and more tempted to go along with them.

Most of the time recently they have been in a vicious fight over whether it is really Shrek's Weenie the Empress is holding, or whether it is just a rare form of a rubber duckie from Speaker Boner's collection.

If Shrek wants his weenie back he has to bang Big Bird in the White Old House is the latest counter offer.

There are other ways to look at it, for instance the last episode of this series.

Our MOMCOM series shows how the war college industry partners with the MSM industry (the propaganda arm of MOMCOM), to whoop it up for the home team:

The U.S. military now has more people in its marching bands than the State Department has in its foreign service — and that’s preposterous.

(The Big Taboo, NY Times). Can you imagine, more high school type marching bands (notice they have even attached "marching", a military concept, to high school bands) than those who work for good "foreign relations" in the U.S. State Department.

The betrayalized general intellectual warmongers voice a philosophy constantly these daze, an ideology that is a laneoReaganism (a.k.a. paingyrics, a.k.a. panegyrics), which fundamentally wants to make "government" small enough "to drown in a bath tub".

Note, in bold words, that "government" in their mind does not include the military, it only includes the judicial, legislative, and administrative branches of "the gummit".

I am reading an xMass gift, a book, also written by Sean Wilentz, a noted American historian, entitled "Bob Dylan In America".

Obama shows us, by doubling down on the W compass, a.k.a. "doin' thuh Reagan", that he runs a front - yes, a coverup of his "real politik".

Take for example his inviting Bob Dylan to perform at the White House.

Then afterward he studies up on Reaganomics and waronomics, like he is reading a script from that old useless relic the Schizophrenic Dance of the Doomed, instead of the American Tradition which Bob Dylan has now mastered.

I only wish Dylan had performed Masters of War instead of The Times Are A Changin when he sang at the White House, because the fundamental 800 lb. gorilla in the room issue for this era is:

We face wrenching budget cutting in the years ahead, but there’s one huge area of government spending that Democrats and Republicans alike have so far treated as sacrosanct.

It’s the military/security world, and it’s time to bust that taboo.

(The Big Taboo, NY Times). The author of that NYT post, Nicholas D. Kristof, says we spend "almost" as much on warmongering as all the other nations put together.

Regular readers of Dredd Blog know that we believe that we spend more than all of the rest put together, not just "almost as much", because the gigantic spy industry is part of that "it".

As we pointed out recently, nobody knows where the edges of that spy realm are (are there any?), nor does anyone know where all the bank accounts of that realm are or where they "end".

In closing, remember that this nation could have avoided "gore, blood & guts, hate, mass murder, and deceit 24/7", together with endless doom-bringing deficits, by listening to Dylan instead of taking off the nation's constitutional clothing:

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

(Masters of War, Bob Dylan). In his post, Mr. Kristof called American Imperialism "sacrosanct", which is just another way of saying "jihad", which means "holy war".

A group, nation, or civilization cannot be considered sane and at the same time have the same psychotic symptoms that individual people have when those individual people are diagnosed as suffering from dementia of one sort or the other.

Three well-known individuals of history have pointed this out, each in their own unique way:

"I would not say that such an attempt to apply psychoanalysis to civilized society would be fanciful or doomed to fruitlessness." - Sigmund Freud

“Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

“The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

(see e.g. The Life and Death of Bright Things). We can sanely and properly deduce that it is time for a check up, time for psychoanalysis, yes time for the U.S.eh? in particular, civilization in general, to do some deep and serious soul searching -- like individual people do from time to time.

But there are rules against the psychoanalysis of the untouched:

I write this despite the so-called Goldwater Rule, an ethical standard the American Psychiatric Association adopted in the 1970s that directs psychiatrists not to comment on someone’s mental state if they have not examined him and gotten permission to discuss his case. It has had a chilling effect. After mass murders, our airwaves are filled with unfounded speculations about video games, our culture of hedonism and our loss of religious faith, while psychiatrists, the ones who know the most about severe mental illness, are largely marginalized.

(NY Times, emphasis added). But how would a psychiatrist "touch" a group, nation, or civilization with the reality of its condition anyway?

Better still, how would the American Psychiatric Association touch a group, nation, or civilization with the reality of its condition?

Here again, Freud was ahead of the curve enough to give us a starting point:

I would not say that such an attempt to apply psychoanalysis to civilized society would be fanciful or doomed to fruitlessness.
...
The diagnosis of collective neuroses, moreover, will be confronted by a special difficulty. In the neurosis of an individual we can use as a starting point the contrast presented to us between the patient and his environment which we assume to be normal. No such background as this would be available for any society similarly affected; it would have to be supplied in some other way. And with regard to any therapeutic application of our knowledge, what would be the use of the most acute analysis of social neuroses, since no one possesses power to compel the community to adopt the therapy? In spite of all these difficulties, we may expect that one day someone will venture upon this research into the pathology of civilized communities.

Very clearly, those two pieces at Huffington Post draw a very bright line distinction between the religion that military evangelists teach and practice at West Point, and the one that John Dear says is the actual teaching of Jesus the Christ.

"What does that have to do with the origin of 'The Bully Religion'?" you may be asking.

You may also be asking "just what is this bully religion you are talking about Dredd?"

Regular readers who have read those posts know that Dredd Blog equates the religions of any military empire with Mithraism, which to most observers, including young cadets, is indistinguishable from what the military calls Christianity.

But so that we don't put the nuts and bolts of today's post off any longer, the contrast in the two Huffington Post pieces mentioned above can be drawn into full strength with the following information that compares historical Mithraism with historical Christianity:

1)Mithras was “the Light of the World“ (Jesus said “I am the light of the world.” John 8:12).

2)Mithras was a member of a Holy Trinity (“Christians are baptized ‘in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’ … ‘The faith of all Christians rests on the Trinity.’ St. Caesarius of Arles, Sermo 9, Exp. symb.: CCL 103, 47″; see also Mt 28:19).

3)Mithras was born of a virgin (Jesus was born of a virgin. see Matthew 1:18-25).

4)Worshippers of Mithras held strong beliefs in a celestial heaven and an infernal hell (“The Bible speaks clearly of the existence of Heaven … Hell is also spoken of in the Bible, but its nature is even more sketchy. When Jesus described the destiny of sinners who refused to change their ways, he compared it to Gehenna, which was a rubbish dump outside Jerusalem. People in wretched poverty picked their way through it to find scraps, and fires burned”).

5)Worshippers of Mithras believed they would be given endless life (“For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality” I Cor 15:53).

6)Worshippers of Mithras believed in a final day of judgement in which the dead would resurrect (“But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?” I Cor 15:12).

7)Worshippers of Mithras believed in a final conflict that would destroy the existing order of all things (“Then I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies gathered together to make war against the rider on the horse and his army” Rev 19:19; “Then they gathered the kings together to the place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon” Rev 16:16).

8)Mithras worshippers believed that a ritualistic baptism was required of the faithful (“Then Jesus came to them and said, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit …’” Matthew 28:18-20).

9)Mithras worshippers took part in a ceremony in which they drank wine and ate bread to symbolize the body and blood of Mithras (“While they were eating, Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, ‘Take and eat; this is my body’” Matthew 26:26; “And he took a cup of wine and gave thanks to God for it. He gave it to them and said, “Each of you drink from it, for this is my blood, which confirms the covenant between God and his people. It is poured out as a sacrifice to forgive the sins of many” Matthew 26:26-28).

10)Mithras worshippers believed that Sundays were held sacred (“the majority observance of Christian Sabbath is as Sunday rest” - Wikipedia).

11)The birth of Mithras was celebrated annually on December the 25th (“Christmas … is an annual commemoration of the birth of Jesus Christ and a widely observed holiday, celebrated generally on December 25 by billions of people around the world” - Wikipedia).

12)Mithras took part in a Last Supper with his companions before ascending to heaven (“The Last Supper is the final meal that, according to Christian belief, Jesus shared with his Apostles in Jerusalem before his crucifixion.” Wikipedia; “Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.” Acts 1:11)

According to John Dear, in his post mentioned above, this is what the fundamental difference is:

When the nonviolent Jesus was born two thousand years ago into abject poverty to homeless refugees on the outskirts of a brutal empire, the story goes that angels appeared in the sky to impoverished shepherds singing, "Glory to God in the highest and peace on earth!"

Peace was coming to the world! They were so excited, they couldn't contain themselves.

That's what Christmas is about -- the coming of "peace on earth."

That child grew up to become, in Gandhi's words, "the greatest nonviolent resister in the history of the world." Jesus taught peace, lived peace and blessed peacemakers. "My peace is my gift to you," he said. When we refused to learn "the things that make for peace," he broke down and wept. He took action to end systemic injustice, and he did it in a nonviolent way and, for his civil disobedience, he was brutally executed by the Roman Empire and died forgiving his killers.

(Christmas 'Peace on Earth' Means 'No More War'). Did you notice the last sentence containing "he was brutally executed by the Roman Empire", and did you read up-thread that Mithraism was the religion of the Roman soldiers who crucified Jesus?

The differences between the two essences are as stark as the 12 similarities listed above, according to a quote that describes the habits of those Roman soldiers:

“Polybius claimed that the Romans deliberately caused as much destruction as possible, slaughtering and dismembering animals as well as people, to deter other communities from resisting Roman demands to surrender; mercy. Male inhabitants were usually slaughtered, women raped, though only in exceptional circumstances killed in the initial orgy of destruction. After that, as tempers cooled and the desire for profit took over, prisoners would be taken for sale as slaves, though at times any considered to have a low market value, such as the very old, were still massacred.”

(Complete Roman Army, Goldsworthy, 197, see also 172-73). The bully religion is Mithraism, it is not the religion of Jesus, the one Mahatma Gandhi is quoted up-thread describing as "the greatest nonviolent resister in the history of the world."

The threat that Dredd Blog is focusing on in today's post, which for all practical purposes has been ignored by the government for years, is the green house gas pollution that causes global warming induced climate change.

Here at Dredd Blog it has been said over and over that one of the most often seen phrase is "worse than previously thought", a phrase that brought some 2,290,000 Google hits ("worse than previously expected" and similar phrases add to the count).

Well, today there is another case of "worse than previously thought", which goes like this:

West Antarctica is warming almost twice as fast as previously believed, adding to worries of a thaw that would add to sea level rise from San Francisco to Shanghai, a study showed on Sunday.
...
The western part of the ice sheet is experiencing nearly twice as much warming as previously thought," Ohio State University said in a statement of the study led by its geography professor David Bromwich.

The warming "raises further concerns about the future contribution of Antarctica to sea level rise," it said. Higher summer temperatures raised risks of a surface melt of ice and snow even though most of Antarctica is in a year-round deep freeze.

Low-lying nations from Bangladesh to Tuvalu are especially vulnerable to sea level rise, as are coastal cities from London to Buenos Aires. Sea levels have risen by about 20 cms (8 inches) in the past century.

The United Nations panel of climate experts projects that sea levels will rise by between 18 and 59 cms (7-24 inches) this century, and by more if a thaw of Greenland and Antarctica accelerates, due to global warming caused by human activities.

(Reuters, emphasis added; see this also). Twice 24 inches is 4 feet, but what if it also means a rise sooner than expected?

New York felt the results of sea level rise, as did New Jersey and other Eastern Seaboard states, with the storm surge of Hurricane Sandy this year and Hurricane Irene last year.

The storm surge on top of sea level rise and high tides there were too much for those states that have ignored the dangers for too long.

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